VERNON HOWARD

1. What to Do with Yourself Each Moment

“I’ll read a short story to you. There was once a man whoreached his one hundredth birthday. On that day he finallyrealized something. He realized that he had been wrong all his one hundred years. That man achieved the purpose of his life.”

What to Do with Yourself Each Moment=============================End Mental Blocks and Soar Freely

“Blockage is a slam of one part of the mind into another part of the mind. Now that’s what it’s really confined to, to banging and crashing and hurting and crying out in pain, the whole operation takes place right up here inside your own mind. But since we always project things outwardly, we always think the wall, the obstacle is outside in the other person or in a situation. So the first thing we want to know about blockage is that we have to work with it whereit is located, which is inside ourselves.”

“Personal happiness arises from personal goodness. Only when you are an internally good man or woman can you be a carefree man or woman.”

Pathways to HappinessSomething Higher Than Ideas – MP3 CD, Talk # 12=============================The Freedom of Being Good

“Haven’t you noticed the great exhilaration you have when you say something that cuts another person down, or you say something that you know is going to cause the man to get angry or the woman to cry? Can you right now start the cure to this very deeply hidden enemy by remembering as recently as possible when you did just what I’m talking about, where you think wrongly that there is a certain gain, need, necessity, excitement, pleasure, in doing or saying something that will cause suffering or distress to another human being.

I want you to know that you have it there and your wish to hurt another is what is hurting you – they are the same thing.

Inside of you is the fire that wants to hurt someone else andyou yourself are burning from that fire. And I’ll tell youright now, as much as you think that it serves you, it destroysyou.”

The Freedom Of Being GoodSomething Higher Than Ideas – MP3 CD, Talk # 13=============================How to Enjoy Your Life Journey

“There’s so much in the world we don’t see, so much in the invisible spiritual world that we don’t see simply because we’re the passenger in the tourist bus with the shade drawn. The bus is going through so many interesting places, the mountains and the lakes and the broad highways and the passengers sitting there looking straight forward, shade down, not knowing what we could have, what we couldsee, that we could relate to, that would be right impressions, right rewards, if only we would shake our heads and open the window and look out.

But instead of that, we have that familiar thing known as highway hypnosis on our way through life, in which we think the same old thoughts and feel the same old feelings – and dreadfully enough, are content with them.

The secret of having a new life, a new mind, a new nature, thesecret is to be sitting in that bus, hearing the slight soundsabout you and suddenly catch yourself seated in that chair,looking forward and realizing your confinement, realizing your non right involvement with your own journey.

What are you involved in, sitting in a bus, staring at the seatin front of you, the back of it, staring at it, your mind dulland your spirit even duller, nothing real happening, nothingbright happening. I can understand completely why you’re so depressed, why you have no life at all. All you have is a head slightly bent down and your eyes see nothing and there’s a slight whirl in your ears.

I am telling you, all of you here, those of you who are new and the rest of you, I am telling you your condition. You’re seated on the bus staring forward, not knowing what a different life it would be if you would just wake up from your daze long enough to reach over and pull up the shade and look out and see the difference between your thoughts and the bright green beautiful world out there.

What’s it going to take, I’ve asked you that question many times.What’s it going to take to wake you up?”

How to Enjoy Your Life JourneySomething Higher Than Ideas – MP3 CD, Talk # 6
=============================Your Richest Investment in Life

“Now look at this. You are investing every minute whatever your nature is at that minute. So far then, when it’s ten after two, think of all the hundreds and thousands of minutes that have passed since last night, for example, when your nature has put itself out into the world, invested itself in the world and got back exactly the same quality, good or bad, that it put out.”

“The purpose of stories, illustrations, parables is to enable the listener, the audience to go from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the known to the unknown. You know what a river is. You know what a building is. You know what a tree is. You know what a canyon is. Familiar sights, they’re known to your mind. So when you hear a story about a river or a tree, you can put the two together.You can see when you’re told that a tree must be watered, it must be given sunshine, very easily and automatically you sense the illustration that this is what we have to do in the inner spiritual life.

So that’s one purpose, simply to shift from what you already know which is easy to understand to something that is not so easy to understand. And the familiar makes the unfamiliar understandable.That’s one reason.

Another reason, as you have seen in many of the stories andillustrations we’ve had, is to put yourself in the place of thecentral figure. And as you’ve heard these parables, stories,you have sensed have you not, that’s me. That’s me who’s lost out in the desert. That’s me who’s out in a ship and there’s no steering wheel on it and I seem to be at the mercy of the storm and of the currents. We know this is a spiritual class, so we say, “That’s me out on that boat.” And then the solution comes, the man builds his own steering wheel or hoists the sail which guides him back to port.

And there’s one thing about all our illustrations in this classwhich should make you very happy, which is that they all have a happy ending. Because at the end of every story, Truth says, ‘This is it. Now you’ve heard an illustration. You’ve been given truths. Now all you have to do is do the work connected with it.'”

Our Class Aim is to Heal Not to HurtSomething Higher Than Ideas – MP3 CD, Talk # 3
=============================Reach the Ocean of Oneness

“Do you know what we should be doing all day long?Maybe at ten o’clock in the morning, you’re around the home or you’re working out somewhere and all of a sudden you clap your hand to your forehead and you say, ‘How marvelous, I see an obstacle that I never saw before. For example, in talking with people, I see my compulsive need to break in and say something while they’re still talking. Oh, I saw that for the first time.’Seeing it isn’t breaking it, isn’t going around the obstacle,as yet, is it? But it’s so that you can begin to see yourself,as an example, see yourself doing that.

Seeing the obstacle clearly is the beginning of going around it or coming up from under it or whatever it might be so that you are flowing naturally with spiritual gravity instead of saying,‘Oh’, have you ever said, ‘I’m going to break that habit. I’mgoing to break that habit of _’ What? Fill in the blank. Whathappened? The habit continued didn’t it? And what happened after it? Now you feel ashamed of yourself and why did you feel ashamed of yourself? ‘The great powerful me, the King of the world can’t even put a cigarette down.’ You feel humiliated and you also know that any humiliation over that just simply reinforces the habit as well as reinforces your idea that you have a personality, that you have a self that can do anything.

Now listen very carefully to this. Here’s a key thought for tonight. Think of your life as an activity, not a personality. Let that one go real slow and we will take it apart a little bit. Think of your life as a series of actions that are happening, not you as a personality making them happen.”

“You are going to have to begin a long, very serious de-idolization of thought. Now we know it’s practical out in the life there, you use thought to learn how to drive your car, we know all that.I’m talking about trying to think your way above yourself, which is impossible to do. You see, thought cannot understand thought.Thought is incapable of looking at another thought and seeing it and understanding it, because it’s all in the same basket.

In order to understand thought you have to have something outside of it, above it, that can look down and see it and see tens of thousands of thoughts operating all day long and understand why they are that way. One child in the kindergarten can’t instruct anotherchild in kindergarten, they’re all in the same place.”

“Action and movement are everyday habits. We are completely involved in doing things, thinking things, planning things out, in action all the time, which in itself is natural and harmless. But alongside and connected with our wrong movements out in the world and within,
connected with the wrong ones are right ones, but we don’t know the difference.

So this morning, instead of thinking of doing something, which is so confusing if all you have is an intellect, instead of thinking of action, think of not doing something. Think of ceasing to perform certain actions that you presently perform.”

“Now to acquire something loftier than what you are now, you have to see a few things. And one of the most vital things to see is the last thing you want to see. Listen to the phraseI’m going to give you: _awareness of ignorance_.

Did it ever occur to you that you can be aware of your ignorance?You’re not aware of it now, you are it, you’re living it, you’reproud of it, you call your ignorance truth and intelligence.

See you can’t start toward the higher path by talking about your loving spirit, or about your cooperative attitudes toward the world and how kind you are and how nice you are because that simply is an untruth, isn’t it? Awareness of your ignorance in thinking and saying and believing that you have anything good is the beginning of higher wisdom which will set you free.Awareness that you have nothing decent about you at all. Allyour decent thoughts are indecent because they are calculating.Now you don’t want to see that, do you?”

“Don’t go around saying how religious you are and how nice you are and how close you are to spiritual principles. You’re trying to pardon yourself, you’re trying to make something work that can never work. You’re using the mind to try to free the mind, which is only frustration.”

Underneath it all, we want to change our destiny, our destination. We want to change the place we are heading for because you know, feel and are horrified by the subconscious knowledge that you’re heading to a very bad place. You’re not going toward anything that ever isgoing to relieve the heartache. Now to change your destiny, we’re talking about spiritual destiny, to change that, something must overwhelmingly occur to you and when it does you’ll never be the same man or the same woman before. The knowledge that has to come to you is that there is something in this universe that is totally superior to any and every idea that you can think, that you can have.”